The economic crisis that began with the stock market crash in October 1929 paved the way for the most substantial permanent institutional change in the history of the United States. The expansion of government power over the individual and social life would make the responses to previous crises pale in comparison. It all began with a plummeting of stock-market values, a predictable (and predicted) consequence of the manipulation of money and credit by the Federal Reserve System, which was established less than 20 years earlier precisely to prevent money and banking crises.

Earlier crises and depressions were short-lived because government leaders, such as President Grover Cleveland, restrained themselves and let markets adjust to new conditions and reestablish their own relative stability. But the response in 1929 was different. While popular accounts hold that government corrective action did not begin until 1933, after the defeat of President Herbert Hoover by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that is not the case. After the stock-market crash, Hoover signed the historic Smoot-Hawley tariff increase, crippling U.S. exports and world trade generally; pressured businessmen to maintain high real wages despite falling prices and a declining demand for labor; supported increased government spending; raised taxes; engaged in deficit spending; and backed the creation of new interventionist programs and agencies, such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to funnel capital to favored failing banks, railroads, and state governments. This was hardly laissez faire. As historian William Appleman Williams wrote, Hoover was not the last of the old presidents but the first of the new.

Nevertheless, when Roosevelt took office, the level of intervention went up several notches. While Hoover had laid the groundwork for debilitating economic intervention that prolonged the crisis, Roosevelt greatly expanded government power using the rhetoric of class warfare and then created the massive federal dole in response to the predictable failure of such approaches. The result was the New Deal, built on World War I precedents, complete with emergency executive decrees, such as the order for citizens to surrender their gold, and the establishment of permanent agencies designed to guide the economic activities of the entire society, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and Social Security Administration. The pragmatic Roosevelt and his collectivist Brain Trust took full advantage of crisis and despair to radically disfigure the American political-economic landscape. But for all his effort, America did not rise out of the Depression, in fact it worsened and unemployment remained high throughout the 1930s. And today, the U.S. system largely reflects this statist vision, with both liberal and conservative presidents expressing allegiance to the New Deal as having saved free enterprise. Roosevelts ultimate legacy was the firm planting of the principle, even among the general population, that without the President and the federal governments oversight and direction of the economy, massive unemployment and economic hardship would result.

Garrity, John A. The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression, American Historical Review, Vol. 78 (October 1973). The New Deal in the U.S. was very similar to European fascist economic policies.

Garrity, John A. The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression, American Historical Review, Vol. 78 (October 1973). The New Deal in the U.S. was very similar to European fascist economic policies.

Regnery, Henry. Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979.The autobiography of the man responsible for publishing many of the major books on World War II revisionism, in contrast to the blackout-efforts of so muh of the mainstream book trade.

Viereck, George S. Men Into Beasts. New York: Fawcett, 1952. The second volume of Vierecks autobiography in which he recalls his efforts to keep America out of war, and the Sedition Trial of 1944-45 attempting to smear him.